Contents

We hope to use the Wikibooks format to make an Open Source Handbook on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, freely accessible for everyone, that can be updated continuously.

Wikipedia is growing fast and one of the most visited websites on the net – a valuable resource of information we all use.

In science and technology we often need more detailed information than what can be presented in a brief encyclopedic article – and here wikibooks.org, a sister project to Wikipedia, can help us with this newly started handbook.

Though the book is still in its infancy, it has been elected book of the month December 2006, and we hope this will provide PR and more people contributing to the project!

The plan to create the book:

1: First to create smaller articles to ‘cover’ the entire area of nanotechnology and achieve a well defined structure the book (some parts could be revised thoroughly in this process,for instance the materials chapter).

2: Once the structure is reasonably well defined, to begin refining the articles with in-depth material so we reach lecture-note level material.

3: Since everybody can contribute, a continuous contribution of material is expected and a backing group of editors is needed to maintain a trustworthy level of information.

An voluntary editorial board is being put together to oversee the book, support, contribute and follow its development.

Discussion about the content of the book can be found on the main talk page talk:Nanotechnology

As with Wikipedia, we hope to see a solid information resource continuously updated with open source material available for everyone!

Add references whenever possible, with reference lists at the end of each page. Please try to make links to the articles with the DOI (digital object identifier) because that gives a uniform and structured access for everyone to the papers.

All papers get a DOI - a unique number like a bar code in a supermarket. All DOIs are registered by www.doi.org and in the reference list you can add links like http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/b504435a so people will be able to find it no matter how the homepage of the journal or their own library changes.

Add links to the Wikipedia whenever possible - and for the beginning I will rely extensively on Wikipedia's pages on the subjects, simply referring to these. This textbook could be simply a gathering of Wikipedia pages, but an encyclopedia entry is brief, and for a handbook it is preferable to have more in-depth material with examples and the necessary formulas. So, some information in this textbook will be very much like the Wikipedia entries and we might not need to write it in the book but can simply refer to Wikipedia, but the hope is that this will be more a text book as is the intention with Wikibooks.

The book was started by Kristian Molhave(wiki user page) 13. Apr. 2006. Initially it was named Nanowiki, and later changed to Nanotechnology. Kristian is currently slowly uploading material to the book and looking for people who would like to contribute that can and substantial material to specific sections under the GNU license. I hope we can make an 'editorial panel' of people each keeping an eye on and updating specific sections.

The Summer 2008 Duke Talent Identification Program (TIP) eStudies Nanotechnology students will be adding to the content of this Wikibook. From June-Aug 2008 there will be content additions with references that will add to this great resource.

I am not currently sure how work on wikibooks or wikipedia can be referenced reliably in published literature.

Three suggestions:

1) Reference the references from the wikibook. Wikibooks are not intended to be the publication channel for new results, but should be based on published and accepted information with references and these references can be used. But this of course does not give credit to the book, so I recommend then adding an acknowledgement about the book to give it PR and credit.

2) Reference the book with a specific page and date - the previous versions of the pages are all available in the history pane and can easily be accessed by future users. You can also hit "permanent version" on the left side of the webpage (it is under "toolbox"). That sends you specifically to the selected version of the wikipage with a link to it that will never change.

3) Reference the PDF version and its version number. Once the book achieves a reasonable level, PDF versions will become available for download and they will have a unique version number and can be retrieved.